“Nestorians, rending Christ asunder, and dividing him into two persons (one divine and the other human); “The followers of Eutyches, by confounding in his person those natures which they should distinguish (asserting that his human nature was absorbed in the divine, and objecting to any distinction between the two). “Against these there have been four most famous councils: “1. Nice against the Arians, A. D. 325. “2. Constantinople against the Apollinarians, A. D. 381. “3. Ephesus against the Nestorians, A. D. 431. “4. Chalcedon against the Eutychians, A. D. 451.” Upon the theme of the first of these great Ecumenical Councils, the present paper will be a compilation. A momentous era has arrived in the history of the church and of the world. For the first time a Christian ruler has come to the throne of the Cæsars. With his chosen standard of the cross, Constantine has subdued the opposing factions—in the Roman empire, and over his vast realm there goes the edict that sets the Christians free from Pagan tyranny and persecution. The church has grown through three centuries of stern conflict with the error and darkness, the evils and wrongs of the world, to be a mighty power in the earth. Her course through suffering and toil, along a path tracked with the blood of the martyrs, has been a march of victory and conquest. A long list of eminent names is on her calendar. But now in the period of emancipation and prosperity she is beset by a complication of new dangers. Alliance with the state exposes her to a strain of corrupting influences. In the removal of compacting pressure from without, dissensions spring up within. Factions in the empire having been overcome, Constantine finds himself compelled to deal with factions in the church. In Alexandria, the most learned see of Christendom, a difference of view and a violent discussion had sprung up on the doctrine of the Trinity. The schism extended until the whole church became agitated over the question. Arius, one of the prime movers in it, reasoning upon the relation of the terms Father and Son, arrived at the conclusion that the Son, though the first born of beings, did not exist from eternity. “The controversy turned,” says Dean Stanley, in his “History of the Eastern Church,” “on the relations of the divine persons in the Trinity, not only before the incarnation, before creation, before time, but before the first beginnings of time. ‘There was,’ the Arian doctrine did not venture to say _a time_—but ‘there was _when_ he was not.’ It was the excess of dogmatism upon the most abstract words in the most abstract region of human thought.”